I got a message from a friend today who had read my comments about including HTML pages (see February 2).  He pointed out that the Server-Side Includes specification handles that nicely.  And it does.  It’s painfully simple.  The following will include three diary entry pages into one page:

<!–#include virtual=”diary/2001/2001_11.htm” –>
<!–#include virtual=”diary/2001/2001_10.htm” –>
<!–#include virtual=”diary/2001/2001_09.htm” –>

Now, this has to be in a .SHTML file, but that’s no problem.

Reader Eric Lawrence tried to make that point to me last week, but I thought he was talking about Microsoft’s Front Page Extensions implementation, which I wanted no part of.

Anyway, there are still some issues with the #include syntax that I haven’t cleared up, but it looks like I’ll be able to use the SSI directives to create my indexed web diary.  Stay tuned.